If you answered, "Journalists don't have any imagination", congratulations. Yes, all three are viable, and while none of the above exists now, in all probability all will.

The tattoo concept, for example, is based on the premise that a wafer-thin screen could be inserted under human skin and be "addressable", meaning specific points on the screen could be contacted and given instructions on what to draw, where to move and at what speed.

"Addressable ink is feasibly inserted by using a tattoo needle," says Clive van Heerden, senior director at Philips Design. "Theoretically, you can create a conductive grid with the layer of skin."

A film of the concept has been aired at various forums - from Dutch Design Week to a Tokyo tech fair - as a way to spark discussion and it certainly accomplished that.

"Our interest was in what people felt about that level of technological penetration," van Heerden says. "The feedback we got wasn't about, 'Would this be carcinogenic?' or 'Where would you put the battery?'

"The response was overwhelmingly, 'Who controls this thing? Is some corporation going to start sending advertisements to my skin? Is it possible for people to hack into it?"'

Given that the technology is 15 to 20 years away, the answers are not yet knowable, van Heerden says, but for such theoretical work, the questions are more important for now.

Not all of the work at Philips has such a distant horizon.

The Philips team also designed a self-sustainable building. The structure, hypothetically situated in China, has a membrane that collects and directs air, recycles and filters water and monitors the sun to capture and direct the light as efficiently as possible. The system filters air pollution and captures rain water. Human waste from the building is converted into a biogas for heating and cooking.

The path from concept to consumer is uncharted but that doesn't mean it is also unachievable. Nor does it preclude practical applications.

Another of van Heerden's projects has looked at the concept of using biometric data such as heart rate and reflecting that information in the clothes people wear. A quick pulse and a blushing face, for instance, could affect the colour of a dress and indicate attraction.

Philips has no intention of entering the fashion world but the electronics company could apply such research to make consumer devices identify our moods and respond accordingly.

"In you're sitting in a traffic jam, maybe it's not the best time to be receiving phone calls from your bank," van Heerden says. But it might be the ideal moment for the back-massage facility in a Mercedes-Benz SL500 to activate itself.

Of course, such advanced research isn't limited to Philips. At Fuji Xerox, researchers are developing ways to identify documents by recording the random arrangement of wood fibres on individual sheets of paper.

The pattern of fibres is said to be as unique as a human fingerprint. The idea behind the work is to store a record of the document's "fingerprint" in a database and thwart would-be counterfeiters. Research so far has shown the fibres remain usable even after paper is folded.

Fuji Xerox is also looking at inserting microscopic material into ordinary paper to make it trackable. The material is about 40 microns wide - thinner than a human hair - and an electronic signal indicates its status, such as confidential or private.

The document could then be recognised at a building's exit. Similarly, photocopiers and shredders could have sensors installed to allow or disallow copying or destruction of a document.

Even a scanned document could insert an electronic signature to alert email administrators of a potential act of corporate espionage.

Other futuristic projects at Fuji Xerox involve the pairing of optical character recognition technology with language translation technology to produce instant translations.

Historically, ambitions for rapid translation have been stymied by the need to retype written documents, often in characters that are unfamiliar. Most English speakers, for example, struggle to correctly replicate material in languages that use other characters, such as Chinese.

The Fuji Xerox scanner would input a document in one language, identify it as, say Arabic, and then produce a copy in another language on the fly.

In Japan, researchers at NEC are merging technology with aesthetics to find new ways of storing information.

One such project, the Flacon, is a virtual storage bottle. Inside the container, representations of its contents float around at random. The Flacon also includes a projector so memories of a wedding, for example, could be viewed and shared at will, says Takeshi Terasawa, the chief designer at NEC Resonantware.

Another potential device, dubbed Axes, aims to challenge some of the most basic assumptions of how humans use computers. A mouse and keyboard may be efficient for some computer tasks but they're of little use for narrowing a search for information on the web.

The Axes prototype, however, features dials around a screen that people could adjust manually. As an analogy, think of how a graphic equaliser can be used to fine-tune the sound of a stereo.

"The idea is to use the dials to narrow the conditions and help us find the information we want," Terasawa says. "Six conditions are set for the six dials."

He says NEC is also exploring what it calls the Dew, "a life-recording interface". It includes a camera that records 24 hours a day and a viewer that can play back the events and memories that have been stored.

The camera would be worn as a stylish necklace that collects scenes of the world around us without the need for human intervention. With permission, images of yourself captured by Dews worn by other people could be viewed on a shared network.

One other area of exploration involves creating communication terminals that can convey human emotion. A potential means for achieving this is the Kotohana, a device that interprets emotions from the voices of its users and then responds by colouring a flower-shaped terminal.

Terasawa says the Kotohana could provide a means for sharing feelings in a more direct way. If you're feeling calm, the flower you share with a partner might be yellow. Feeling sad? It might be blue. And if you're feeling envious about the technology that awaits us in a generation, you might find your Kotohana has turned green.